by Ian McDonald
July 10
NO FAERIES TODAY, EITHER. But I could feel them as I have never felt them before at Craigdarragh—that spooky, electrical sense of presence.
I am developing a theory about the faery: it is that our world and Otherworld lie one inside the other, like the concentric spheres of the carved Dutch globes, along different planes of being. In many ways they are alike, though I think that to us, Otherworld seems a little smaller than our world. Perhaps to Otherworld it is our world that seems the smaller. Both follow the same path around the Sun, and (here lies the significant difference) both turn, but at very different rates. In our world a day is twenty-four hours long; in Otherworld, a day can be a year from dawn to sunset. Daddy would be pleased with my next piece of reasoning: I consulted the atlas in the library and thought it all out very scientifically. Because the periods of rotation are different, there may be times when our world’s axis is inclined at a different angle from that of Otherworld, with the result that the surface of Otherworld touches, then passes through, the surface of our world. This area of intersection starts as a point, increases to a circle. Then, as the orbits progress and the axial tilts come back into line again, the zone of interpenetration diminishes again to a point. This, I think, is why Otherworld has always been associated with things of the earth—with hollow hills and the underworld. Mummy’s book makes the point that the legendary entrances to Otherworld have always been through caves and lakes. It would also explain why supernatural events are associated with the equinoxes and solstices—because it is at those dates that the shift of the axes occurs! I think that the geography of Otherworld must be very different from our World. I think there is much less sea, much more land—the Otherworldly Tir Nan Og is always placed in the far west, where we have only the empty Atlantic.
The more I think about my theory, the more it opens up before me, just like one of the magic gates to Otherworld, the moon-shadowed path that leads to the Land of Ever-Youth. I am so excited, it is as if after a long, hard climb, I have come to a high vista from which I can look out over a whole new landscape.
July 11
THE WEATHER IS BETTER, brighter; there is a strong breeze off the Atlantic carrying fast white clouds upon it. I went up to the wood with a sense of expectation and was not disappointed. I saw a pookah—one of the little horse-headed men. It took me quite by surprise—all of a sudden, it just appeared out of the brambles. By the time I had recovered from the surprise and unfolded the camera, it had vanished. But at least I know that they are around. Better luck tomorrow.
I am thinking today about the faeries—how in the old days there were many manifestations of the same person; how they could be a salmon and a rowan and an eagle and a great golden cauldron all at the same time. This leads me to wonder if maybe these latter-day faeries—the pookahs and the leprechauns and the Trooping Faeries—are also forms of the same mythological characters. But they seem to me much less highly sophisticated than the early, elemental personas, almost as if they have degenerated rather than developed. This seems strange to me, so I have been doing a little more reading. The Teaching Sisters would be horrified if they knew I had been reading Charles Darwin; yet it was to his Origin of Species (strangely enough, one of Mummy’s contributions to the library, rather than Daddy’s) I went for help. What I read there only confirmed my suspicions. Creatures do not devolve into less sophisticated forms, but evolve into more developed, generalised ones. Which leads me, dear diary, to my most startling conclusion yet. These smaller, more specialised species of faery are the early, primitive, less evolved forms; the ancient, elemental shape-shifters who were many bodies with one person, they are the later, more highly evolved manifestations. Which can only lead to one conclusion: Time in Otherworld runs in the opposite direction to the way it does in our world.
July 12
SUCCESS TODAY! IN THE morning, I came up quietly on a group of Trooping Faeries at their toilet, washing themselves in the late dew still lying in the bells of foxgloves, and managed to take a couple of photographs. I cannot say if they will come out—I am no photographer—but I hope so much they will. It is so important that I have evidence. I received the impression that the faeries knew I was there and allowed me to photograph them. But, if time runs the other way in Otherworld, then what I did will already have happened to them; to them, the time I start to take photographs is the time I suddenly stop.
The whole of Bridestone Wood feels strange today, as if it were not the place I have grown up beside to know and love, but a part of the ancient wildwoods of Otherworld somehow imposed onto our world. The trees seem very tall, the air full of the sounds of birds—raucous calls, flapping wings.
After luncheon I glimpsed the faery archer. This time there was no misunderstanding; she knew I was there and waited, smiling, for a full minute while I fumbled with the camera before she went leaping off through the undergrowth. Toward teatime, I stumbled across the trail of the Wild Hunt itself and followed them for the better part of half an hour. Alas, all I will doubtless have to show for my efforts will be a few blurred images of antlers silhouetted against the sky.
I am thinking about what I said yesterday about time running the other way in Otherworld. It seems to me that this might be an explanation for the mechanics of magic, though it makes my head spin, thinking too long about it. For example, we wish for something in our present (which is the same as the faeries’ present, this point where our worlds pass each other). The answer comes in our future, which is their past, because the faeries, in their future, which is our past, cause things to change about and set events in motion so that at the proper time—in our future, their past—that wish will come true. This is why magic is just what it is—magic; why there is no apparent link between cause and effect, because, in our direction of time, there isn’t, but to the faeries, everything is done in accordance with their arrow of time, and their laws of cause and effect. In their past, they see the effect, the wish comes true, and so in their future, they must arrange things so the past comes true. But I have the feeling that the faeries are not as strictly bound by the laws of past and present as we are; that is why, in our world, they can be both future and past forms, because they can be whatever they have remembered they were, and whatever they hoped to become.
See? I said it made my head spin if I thought too long and hard about it.
July 22, 1913
Rathkennedy
Breffni
County Sligo
My Dearest Hanny,
A thousand and one apologies. It is much much too long since I last wrote to you, much less saw you. The fault, I fear, is entirely mine, and I cannot even plead having been up to the proverbials in work. Alas, I am purely and simply the world’s worst at writing letters.
Anyway, customary salutations to you, your health, your wealth, your happiness etc., and without further ado, I shall get down to the real meat of this epistle.
My dear Hannibal, you really must drop whatever you are doing at once and come up to Sligo. There is something happening here that is so extraordinary and exciting that—
I am getting ahead of myself. Much less confusing if I were to spell things out in the natural order in which they occurred. Freddie says I am always doing that, rushing off everywhere and nowhere at once.
As you may know, the other Constance, my cousin on the Gore-Booth side of the family, had invited William Butler Yeats up to Lissadell for a few weeks. Well, of course, what with us being Brethren in Arms of the Gaelic Literary League and Green Flag Nationalists, I couldn’t let the occasion go unmarked. So I had Beddowes and the boys from the estate buff up the brass work and slap a lick of paint on old Grania (you remember? The venerable family steam launch) and throw a little boating-party cum picnic cum poetry reading. Among the literati I’d invited was Caroline Desmond (yes, those Desmonds, though she has nothing to do with that contraption bobbing up and down in Sligo Bay) and her daughter Emily, already at her tender years an ardent admirer of Willie�
�s poetry and philosophy. Yes, contrary to what you may have read in the newspapers, there is some sanity and good taste in the household, needless to say, all firmly attached to the distaff. Well, the day went capitally. The weather was perfect, old Grania chugged along without bursting a boiler, no one decided to bless the lough with seasickness, Beddowes didn’t have to fish any of the old spinsters of the League out of the drink with a fishhook, Willie was his usual Olympian self, the wine was actually cool this time, no one was ill from overeating and heatstroke at the picnic on Innisfree, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary here, you are thinking. Patience, my dear Hanny. Patience. It wasn’t until Grania was within sight of the Rathkennedy landing stage that the maroon went up. Willie had, inevitably, gathered a small group of sycophants around him and was regaling them with some learned gobbledygook about Celtic mysticism and the New Age when out of absolutely nowhere, Hanny, this Desmond girl, little Emily, produced a set of photographs which she claimed show legendary creatures inhabiting the woods around her home. Well, of course, with the ensuing uproar, I had to see what the excitement was about. Poor Willie was almost apoplectic, and, well, I hesitate to use stronger words, bless me! if she wasn’t telling the truth. Ten photographs, and notes on where, when, and how taken, down even to the prevailing weather conditions! Some, I will admit, left a lot to the imagination—patches of shadow that could as easily have been the branches of trees as the antlers and spear points of the Wild Hunt of Sidhe which they were claimed to be. But others were less equivocal—two of a brazen hussy dressed only in leather straps, carrying a bow the size of herself, with a smile somewhere between the Giaconda’s and a Montgomery Street madam’s. More convincing yet, one showed a congregation of six little woodland nymphs washing themselves, for the love of heaven, Hanny! in the petals of a foxglove. And, most irrefutable of all, the final two in the sequence—the first, of a little naked mannequin with the head of a horse, and one of herself smiling at a tiny, winged woman sitting in the palm of her hand, combing her long hair with minuscule fingers.
My dear Hanny, what can I say! I have seen the evidence myself and I am convinced of its veracity. Had it been presented by an accomplished photographer, I might have hesitations, but these are the handiwork of a fifteen-year-old girl!
Well, of course, Willie has been in a fine old flap ever since, and wants to arrange a series of interviews, preferably under hypnosis, with Emily to finally prove the existence of a mystical world apart from, but adjacent to, our own. Even before I heard the word hypnosis mentioned, I had thought of you, Hanny; after all, you are the country’s leading investigator of the strange and supernatural. Willie hasn’t the first idea about mesmerism, let alone how to go about an investigation scientifically, so I suggested you to him with a few of your credentials and he insisted that you be in attendance. I know you’ll hardly need asking twice, but please hold your horses one moment before throwing things into cases, telephoning the station, etc., and I’ll summarise the arrangements.
Caroline Desmond has suggested the weekend of the twenty-seventh of this month as a provisional date. Telegram me, will you, and let me know if it is acceptable. She’s offered to accommodate you, but I said there was more room at Rathkennedy, and anyway, we were old friends. Hanny, dearest, there’s too much we have to talk about! Do say you can make it—I’m dying to see you again. It must be over three years since our paths last crossed.
Erin Go Bragh!
Connie
Excerpts from the Craigdarragh Interviews: July 27, 28, 29, 1913, as Transcribed by Mr. Peter Driscoll, Ll.B., of Sligo.
(The first interview: 9:30 P.M., July 27. In attendance: Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. H. Rooke, Mrs. C. Desmond, Miss E. Desmond, Mrs. C. Booth-Kennedy, Mr. P. Driscoll. Weather, windy, with some rain.)
Yeats: You are quite certain that Emily is in the hypnotic trance and receptive to my questioning, Mr. Rooke?
Rooke: Quite sure, Mr. Yeats.
Yeats: Very well, then. Emily, can you hear me?
Emily: Yes, sir.
Yeats: Tell me, Emily, have those photographs you have shown me been falsified in any way?
Emily: No, sir.
Yeats: The recorder will note that scientific research has proved that it is impossible for a subject to lie under hypnosis. So these are genuine pictures of faery folk, then?
(No reply.)
Rooke: You must question the subject directly, Mr. Yeats.
Yeats: Forgive me, a momentary lapse of memory. I repeat, Emily, are these photographs actual representations of supernatural beings? Faeries?
Emily: Faeries? Of course they are faeries—the Old Folk, the Ever-Living Ones.
Yeats: The recorder will let it show that the subject, on being questioned a second time on the veracity of the photographs, again verified their genuiness. Therefore, having established the validity of the photographs, could you tell me, Emily, on how many occasions these photographs were taken?
Emily: Three occasions. Once in the morning. Twice in the early afternoon. Three days. Then—
Yeats: Go on, Emily.
Emily: It was as if they didn’t want me to take any more photographs of them. They were distant and aloof, like there was a cloud over the sun. They drew apart from me, hid themselves in the wood. I haven’t seen them now in many days, Oh, why do they hide themselves from me? I only want to be their friend.
Yeats: Thank you, Emily. That will be all, for now.
Rooke: Excuse me, Mr. Yeats, one moment. Might I ask a couple of questions before we close? Emily, on what date did the first manifestation occur?
Emily: The first night was the sixth of July. I remember—I wrote it in my diary. It was the last night of the very hot weather. I’d been home from Cross and Passion about ten days. I heard them call my name, and when I went out to look, the garden was full of lights. They led me into the wood. I’d never imagined there were so many of them, or that they were so beautiful.
Rooke: And can you remember what the state of the moon was that night?
Emily: I remember it was very bright—just past full. But oh so bright!
Rooke: July the sixth. I would estimate about thirty minutes past full. Hmm. And the dates of the subsequent manifestations, Emily?
Emily: The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth.
Rooke: Thank you, Emily. Back to you, Mr. Yeats. I have no further questions.
(The second interview: 9:50 P.M., July 28. In attendance: as above. Weather wind gusting from the west, with showers.)
Yeats: This encounter you mentioned yesterday (consulting notes) on the night of the sixth of July—was this your first experience of this nature?
Emily: No.
Yeats: There have been— forgive me— have there been others?
Emily: Yes. One other.
Yeats: Would you tell us about it?
Emily: It was at school, up in Rathfarnham Woods. I’d always felt that they were there, up in the woods. At night I could hear them hunting. I could hear their dogs hunting, I could hear the jingle of bells from their horse bridles and falcon jesses— hunting. It was up in the dell.
Yeats: The dell?
Emily: (seeming to grow impatient) Yes, the dell. My dell, my place, my private place where I could be alone with myself, where I could shut away Cross and Passion and the Teaching Sisters and be still enough to feel the magic.
Yeats: Please, continue.
Emily: There was danger there, from the one who had sent me letters, the one who said he loved me. They came and they drove him away before he could hurt me.
Yeats: What—the faeries? I don’t understand. Emily?
Emily: One was the archer woman, the one I took a photograph of. She was as close to me as you are. Her bow was taller than she was. She isn’t very big, you see, even smaller than I am, and I remember she had an arrow nocked. She fired it at him—not to hurt him, but to scare him—and he ran away. The other was the harper. The blind harper. It is as if he was born without any eyes. There is only blank skin
where the eyes should be. He’s very tall and thin, and he has little rags and ribbons tied all over him—to his fingers, his beard, his hair, the strings of his harp, everywhere. I used to wonder why he had those little rags tied all over him, but now I see! They’re to help him see where he’s going. They’re like a cat’s whiskers—; they’re moved by the wind and the leaves and the branches and can feel the different movements and know where he is. (Murmurs of amazement in the room. Here several persons began to speak at once but were hushed by Mr. H. Rooke.)
Rooke: And could you possibly tell me upon what date this— ah— event occurred?
Emily: It was the second of April.
Rooke: I see. That’s most interesting. Excuse me, Mrs. Desmond, but I presume that your husband, being in the line of investigation that he is, would be in the possession of such a thing as an astronomical almanac or calendar? Could I possibly ask the loan of it for a minute or two? (Here Mrs. C. Desmond retired to the library to fetch said almanac.) Thank you. Let me see, the second of April, 1913— damnation, what’s happening?
C. Desmond: I’m so sorry—it’s another of those pestilential electrical failures I mentioned to you yesterday. Mrs. O’Carolan— Mrs. O’Carolan, lamps, please. If you wish, we may continue by lamplight.
Rooke: Thank you, Mrs. Desmond, but before I can further pursue my inquiries, I have a little research I need to do, and, unless Mr. Yeats has anything further he wants to ask, I rather think we have put poor Emily through quite enough for one evening.
(The third interview: 3:30 P.M., July 29, 1913. Present: as above, with the addition of Dr. E. G. Desmond. Weather cloudy, threatening rain from the West.)